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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2939 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 19, 2025

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Are there any programming languages where spaces can be used to override operator precedence instead (or in addition) of parentheses? E.g. x=1+ ab; // ab evaluates first x=1+a *b; // addition evaulates first

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Whitespace-FAQ#strong-spaces

Thanks!

And I thought that how Python uses whitespace was controversial! Are you looking for people with ropes and torches to come to your home?

I haven't seen one. You'd need to write the parser to specifically take notice of whitespace like that and it's so unusual in a programming language that the designer would have needed to be very insistent on it.

Something mathematical like Maple or MatLab might support it. It's basically implementing a math shorthand to avoid parentheses.

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